I briefly touched on what keywords are in another article, but I’ve decided to go a little more in detail about why you should only target 1 keyword with each individual piece of content.
There are a few main reasons as to why you should only target 1 primary keyword per article, but the general idea never changes. High-quality = high-quality, every single time.
1.) Keyword Density
This is one of the most important reasons as to why you only target 1 primary keyword with each piece of content, whether it’s a new page or a post. Once you start targeting more than 1 keyword in a post is when you’re going to run into keyword stuffing and spam issues.
Google determines what is on a site based on how often certain words that aren’t “stop words” appear in content. So, if you’re targeting 4 keywords in 1 300 word post, you’re going to end up with your keywords being 10-20% of the actual post to do it “effectively” – which isn’t actually effective at all. The ideal keyword density is around 1-3%, which is impossible to keep with more than 1 primary keyword.
2.) LSI Keywords
Latent Semantic Indexing keywords are quickly becoming a primary point of focus, without being focused on too much. Basically, LSI keywords are words that are related to your primary keyword and they are used by Google to further determine the content of a page/site.
Before LSI keywords were implemented, Google had to rely solely on how many times a set keyword was used on whatever page or post, and with companies named after fruits and animals, this become an obsolete idea fast. Hence the implementation of the ability to scan for LSI keywords.
LSI keywords can be leveraged even, if you know how to figure out what they are.
For instance, if my keyword was “Fishing Rods” an example of an LSI keyword could be “Fishing line”, “fishing lures” or even “best fishing hole”.
So how do we leverage LSI keywords?
The easiest way is going to be just using them like a keyword, but chances are you will use LSI keywords even if you don’t mean to – as long as you’re producing high-quality content targeted towards a keyword.
You could use LSI keywords as anchor text in links, or even alt tags for images – and wherever else you aren’t using your primary keyword, without spamming.
3.) Your “Net”
I like fishing, so I’m going to use another fishing example.
Think of writing content with SEO in mind as a fisherman would think of tying his net. If he makes that net too big, he probably wont be able to pull it in and reap the benefits, but if he makes the net too small, he wont catch anything worth-while. So that fisherman really has to focus on creating the perfect sized net for the task at hand.
It’s no different when writing content with SEO in mind.
Your keywords and LSI keywords are like the rope that your net is made from, and your viewers are your fish. Target too broad of an array of keywords, and you will never pull in all the traffic you want, and if you target too narrow of an array, you won’t gain any worth-while traffic.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, each post you write should only be focused on ranking for a single targeted keyword – ideally a long tail version of something really juicy. By doing that, your post will also hit on numerous LSI variants of your primary keyword. In fact, you might end up ranking a lot better for those LSI keywords.
Trying to rank an article for more than a single keyword can lead to all sorts of headaches. The most common is keyword stuffing, or the act of trying to fit a keyword into every single sentence. That’s a sure-fire way to never rank for anything, let alone anything you wanted to.
So, avoid that and only target a single keyword per post. You’ll end up ranking for a lot more and you’ll ultimately bring in more traffic.
Leave a Reply